U.S.: Americans fighting in Syria a risk

More from U.S. join war; officials fear they will be radicalized

Associated Press

Associated Press

Published 9:11 pm, Saturday, November 30, 2013

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Wake County Sheriff's Office via The News & Observer, shows Basit Javed Sheikh. Sheikh, 29, of Cary, N.C., a Pakistani native living in the U.S., is facing federal charges that he sought to join an al-Qaida-linked militant group fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. He is charged in a federal criminal indictment with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was arrested on Nov. 2 before boarding the first of a series of flights that would take him to Lebanon. (AP Photo/Wake County Sheriff's Office via The News & Observer) ORG XMIT: NCRAL601

Federal officials say Americans are joining the bloody civil war in Syria, raising the chances they could become radicalized by al-Qaida-linked militant groups and return to the U.S. as battle-hardened security risks.

The State Department says it has no estimates of how many Americans have taken up weapons to fight military units loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad in the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people over 2½ years.

Other estimates — from an arm of the British defense consultant IHS Jane's and from experts at a nonprofit think tank in London — put the number of Americans at a couple dozen. The IHS group says al-Qaida-linked fighters number about 15,000, with total anti-Assad force at 100,000 or more.

This year, at least three Americans have been charged with planning to fight beside Jabhat al-Nusrah — a radical Islamic organization that the U.S. considers a foreign terrorist group — against Assad. The most recent case involves a Pakistan-born North Carolina man arrested on his way to Lebanon.

At a Senate homeland security committee hearing this month, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., said: "We know that American citizens as well as Canadian and European nationals have taken up arms in Syria, in Yemen and in Somalia. The threat that these individuals could return home to carry out attacks is real and troubling."

The hearing came about two weeks after the FBI and other officers arrested Basit Sheikh, 29, at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport on charges he was on his way to join Jabhat al-Nusrah. Sheikh, a legal resident of the United States, had lived quietly, without a criminal record, in a Raleigh suburb for five years before his Nov. 2 arrest. A similar arrest came in April in Chicago.

And in September, authorities in Virginia released an Army veteran accused of fighting alongside the group after a secret plea deal.

In August, outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller told ABC News that he was concerned about Americans fighting in Syria, specifically "the associations they will make and, secondly, the expertise they will develop, and whether or not they will utilize those associations, utilize that expertise, to undertake an attack on the homeland."

Current FBI Director James Comey said this month that he worried about Syria becoming a repeat of Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion, with foreign fighters attracted there to train.